The power consumption of network devices, such as switches and routers, is increasing and the proportion of the power consumption of the network devices in the entire Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is not negligible. Since electrical nodes, such as Internet protocol (IP) routers, perform processing in units of packets, an increase in speed and capacity of the IP routers increases the power consumption. Although the electrical energy consumed by optical nodes using technologies including Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is low, the optical nodes do not perform the information transmission in units of packet, unlike the IP routers. In addition, since WDM paths are coupled between nodes in full mesh manner in order to transfer information to all the nodes in WDM networks and, the number of wavelengths is limited.
For example, a related technology is disclosed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2003-298517.